This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Materials management in healthcare facilities, like hospitals, is an important mechanism to help ensure that healthcare professionals have ready access to the supplies, medications and other materials that are required to serve the needs of their patients. In addition, such systems monitor inventories of supplies to help reduce waste and control supply costs.
Many hospitals and other healthcare facilities manage their inventory of supplies, medications and other materials using a “par-level” inventory control method (PAR). PAR inventory controls require stocking a predetermined quantity for each item in inventory, referred to as the ‘par level.” The par level may, for example, be based on an average usage of the item over a specific time period (e.g., 2-3 days), thus providing the quantity of items that is desired to be maintained on-hand. As the items are used, the number of items is replenished on a regular basis by taking a physical inventory of the items and then restocking the items to bring the on-hand inventory quantities “up to par.” A PAR inventory control system seeks to avoid an out of stock condition by maintaining close control over inventory quantities.
Another method of inventory control used by hospitals and healthcare facilities is a Kanban system. As in a PAR inventory control system, a Kanban system establishes a target quantity for items to be maintained in on-hand inventory. However, instead of taking physical inventory and restocking item quantities on a regular basis over time to bring the quantities “up to par,” a Kanban system establishes a fixed quantity of inventory depletion that triggers the restocking function. For example, in a “two-bin” -type Kanban system, two identical quantities of the inventory item are stocked in on-hand inventory, each quantity of items, however, is contained in a separate storage “bin.” The on-hand inventory items are taken, as needed, from a first storage bin until that bin's inventory has been depleted. The depletion of inventory from the first storage bin, however, acts as a trigger for initiating the restocking of the on-hand inventory. As the first storage bin is restocked, then, the quantity of inventory items in a second storage bin satisfies the demand for that item. This cycle then repeats. Two-bin Kanban systems, therefore, offer simplicity and efficiency in managing the inventory of low cost supplies. And, unlike a PAR system, no physical inventory or counting of on-hand items is necessary.
In order to operate as intended and maintain the integrity of the inventory management system, however, both the PAR and Kanban methods described require significant user involvement, such as manually conducting regular physical inventories, manual data collection and recording activities, and manually placing of inventory restocking orders. Oftentimes, the operating protocols for these methods become unduly burdensome and time consuming to their users, whose primary work tasks involve the delivery of healthcare services and not inventory management. As such, these methods can foster an undesirable misallocation of human resources. Moreover, the amount of user involvement required by these systems provides opportunities for human error at any of several user interfaces to the systems which can negatively impact their function and efficiency. Other negative features associated with existing PAR and Kanban systems include the inability to ensure that the inventory is deplete in a “first in, first out” manner.
Prior efforts to automate aspects of the inventory management systems in an effort to alleviate some of the burdens placed on the systems' users, such as “weight-based systems” or “push-to-take systems” have proved ineffective and/or have manifested other undesirable features. For example, weight-based systems, which attempt to monitor on-hand inventory levels of stock items by employing scales to measure the weight of the bins containing the items, have high capital costs and require significant materials management operational capabilities. In addition, the reliability of such systems has proved less than desirable since there are many factors which can contribute to a false understanding of the inventory level, including calibration of the scales and variances in packaging for the same products which contribute to different weights for the same products. Push-to-take systems also exhibit noteworthy shortcomings. Push-to-take systems require that the user make a data entry (for example, by pushing a button on the storage bin) each and every time an item is removed from inventory. Consequently, such inventory management systems tend to have low user compliance rates which directly results in low data integrity for the system.